


if i had a heart (i would love you)

by simplyprologue



Series: and i can see for miles, miles, miles [2]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Abandonment Issues, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst and Feels, Emotional Baggage, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, I Wrote This to Hurt Myself, Marriage, Mutual Pining, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rescue Missions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-16
Updated: 2017-01-16
Packaged: 2018-09-17 21:28:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9346640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: Love is a nebulous thing, for men like him. It has done him no good in his life, to love someone, and he cannot conjure up a memory of love as a balm and not as a weapon. He and Jyn don’t speak of love, have never said the words. And if she dies, she’ll leave him with a ream of paperwork signed and notarized, sealing their union, the pink pearlescent burn tissue from Scarif that covers his arms and neck, and his twisted back, a limp disguised as a swaggering gait.And if she dies, he’ll follow her.(Jyn is captured on a mission in order to save the other soldiers in her squadron, and Cassian only knows that he needs to go after her.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** When I set out to write _kindred_ I knew the pacing would be fast and sections short, so this part of the fic was quickly scrapped. So this is less a "missing scene" and more of a "missing 12-15k missing words" from the story. Takes place after their marriage, but long before Galen's conception. 
> 
> Rating will likely go up. Characters will be tagged as they enter the plot. Title is a modified line from "If I Had a Heart," by Fever Ray.
> 
> Thanks as always to Mira.

The Captain’s dead. The explosion on bridge that killed the pilot got him too, and Jyn sits their bodies side by side, stripping them of any identifying patches and tags. Clever fingers find a holoimage of the Captain’s dutiful wife and loving children sewn into the lining of his jacket — without a second thought, she destroys it.

“Where’s the LT?” she yells.

Dreilide better be prepping the damn escape pods.

Around what’s left of the crew, the vessel shakes and keens. They were barely able to get the spacecraft out of atmo before the Imperial ships stationed at Tarsa caught up with them and fired a torpedo into the hull.

There had been _no time._

The Captain had ordered the portlock hatches sealed and the airlock opened to vent the fire — and eight members of their crew. Then the second shot hit, above the cockpit, sending sparks raining down onto their heads. Paneling containing the compressor and the hyperdrive erupted into flames, before exploding as their pilot tried to wire broken parts back into a functioning unit.

There are five of them left. _Mirax. Vestra. Kes._ _Dreilide_ _._ Her heart skitters. Six out of a task force of sixteen.

“He’s just — he’s just sittin’ here, Sarge. LT ain’t use to no one,” Vestra shouts back, as Jyn is in the middle of scrambling the navicomputer. They’re going to get boarded. It’s only a matter of what they’re going to leave for the Empire to find. “Sarge!”

Giving up on scrambling the navigation logs, Jyn unholsters her blaster and shoots it.

“Coming, Private!” She barely casts a glance to the munitions hold. “Kes! Preferably _before_ we get boarded, thanks!”

“Just worry about yourself, Erso!”

“Have I ever?” she bites back, feet barely touching the steps as she descends to the lower deck. The klaxons sing throughout the ship, have been since the first shot was fired over the bow, though Jyn has personal doubts that the Imperials ever intended to _hail_ them. “Private, report.”  

She hears the LT before she sees him, muttering nonsense to himself.

Mirax and Vestra look at her helplessly.

“Lieutenant Dreilide, can you hear me?” Dropping to her knees, she tries to disentangle the LT’s knees from his shoulders, and is only marginally successful. “LT!” she yells, grabbing his head, forcing him to look at her. Dreilide, eyes leaking with tears and snot dripping down his chin, looks straight through her. “Force, LT, listen to me!”

Running arms on Lothal is one thing. Waiting to be boarded by Imperials is another.

Zoran Dreilide is the kind of young man the Alliance likes to hand a commission to, a young fountain of idealism, from the same mold as Luke Skywalker. The sort of young man whose chest they can pin a goddamned medal to in front of the troops.

The ship keens again, a painful noise surrounded by the sound of metal collapsing in on itself. Jyn places a steadying hand on the hull, praying, just _praying_ for another five karking minutes before they’re blown into bits. Taking an edifying breath, she turns back to the two Privates shaking with fear. “Okay, you heard the LT. Finish launch prep on the escape pods, and get into one. We’re shipping out of here. Hopefully launching all four at once will keep them confused long enough for us to make a jump. Short range, but we’ll be able to launch the beacon.”

“What?”

“You _heard the LT, right?”_ she grits out. “We’re taking the tech and we’re launching the escape pods.”

“But what if he—”

“Just get him into a pod, Mirax.”

 _Back on your feet, soldier._ It’s Saw’s voice in her head now. The ship trembles around them, a steady vibration forming into structural collapse. Maybe the entire ship will depressurize and kill them all before the Empire can get to them, Jyn thinks dispassionately. They need to launch the escape pods _now._

“KES!” she shouts again. “FOR THE LOVE OF THE MAKER—”

Three steps at a time, Gunnery Sergeant Damerson flings himself into the lower level, a locked steel box under his arm — the receivers and transmitters they were supposed to place in the Imperial relay station on Tarsa. Their presence on the planet had been scouted before they’d even had the chance and the Imperial fleet had scrambled their fighters and a small craft on an intercept course.

“All right, all right, time to go.” Kes charges past them, dumping the box into the pod, before returning.

Together, he and Jyn heft the LT’s weight against them, and drag him inside. Mirax and Vestra — both teenagers, Jyn tries to remind herself, tries not to remember who she was at twelve, fifteen, eighteen — huddle together on the far side, trying their level best to fade into the bucket seats. Already strapped in, they’re ready for launch. Jyn throws herself into the pilot’s seat, not waiting for the click of Kes or the LT’s restraints.

She powers up each of the escape pods.

The ship rattles, a metallic screech followed by a blast. Cursing under her breath, Jyn engages the forward thrust, and—

Nothing.

She tries again, and the pods power down, engines whirring into stillness. Again. Still nothing. A red light flashes on the dashboard — _automatic disengage override malfunction_ the screen reads.

Dreilide mutters turn into screams before ebbing back into terrified utterances. Sparing the remnants of a crew a look back over her shoulder, Jyn sees Mirax and Vestra’s panicked faces in the glow of starlight. _On your feet, soldier._ She pushes herself out of the seat, and looks at Kes. Looks at Kes, and thinks of Poe safe at home with Shara’s father. Looks at Kes, and sees her own father’s face looking back at her, and hears her own cries as he died in her arms.

“I’m going back to the bridge, I can launch the escape pods manually from there.”

“Sarge!”

She throws Mirax’s hand off her shoulder with a hue of violence, shirking the softness she'd let herself nurture within herself. _Attachment will only get you killed._ Still staring forcefully at Kes, she says, “We’ve programmed in the coordinates into the computer. Once you’re there, it’s a two day push out of Imperial space. Launch the beacon, General Syndulla knows to keep the scanners looking for it — transmit the extraction code. They’ll come and get you.”

“Jyn—” Kes reaches out, palm upwards.

Swallowing hard, she reaches back, briefly letting her fingers rest against his.

Then, Saw’s voice once more: _a failure does not need to be a critical failure if there is one person left to give their life to the cause._ Her eyes find the steel lockbox. Dropping to a squat, she flicks through the combination, and topples off the lid. Her hand grabs one of the transmitters — small, smaller than the tip of her pinky finger. Holding it in her palm, she looks at Kes.

“Launch the beacon,” she repeats.

“What are you—”

Her mouth folds into a grim line. “They’re going to take me alive. If they wanted us dead they’d have blown us up already.”

As if to prove the point for her, an Imperial fires another blow across the hull. Their deflector shields lost power ten minutes ago — they’re not destroying them on purpose.

“Jyn—”

She stumbles through to the escape pod hatch. There’s a medkit in the mess that the fire shouldn’t have destroyed. It’s been years since she’s done stitches on herself, but she doubts it’s a skill she’s lost. “I’ll tell them I launched the pods hoping they’d think the ship was abandoned, see if I can buy you some more — I’ll see if I can get them talking, when they take me for interrogation,” she breathes. Her next words are spoken more like a plea than an order. It’s not that she minds dying, but that she knows the Empire won’t be quick about it. It’s been years since she’s withstood torture. “Be listening, Dameron.”

“But Sarge—”

Vestra, this time.

“I’ve made my bed,” Jyn says, smiling wanly at the young woman. “Now toil on yours.”

“Sarge!” Vesta, even more urgently.

She remembers reading Vesta’s file before they deployed to Tarsa. She’s barely out of basic. She has no idea what it means to fight a war, she’s just another one who climbed onto the first transport off her planet the moment the chrono ticked onto her eighteenth birthday

Though privately, Jyn has doubts about Vesta’s so-reported birth date. But she’s been in the fight since she was eight, and even though the Rebel Alliance has age restrictions it’s never minded looking the other way for an asset. Something locks her feet to the durasteel flooring right outside the hatch, makes her look back one more time at the crew. Death is the horizon coming up to meet her on Scarif, or a blaster bolt that hits her directly in the chest. And when she dies—

Her eyes flutter closed.

Jyn’s hand clenches around the Kyber crystal under her shirt.

Now that she has allowed herself to slow, her heart thrums a steady drumbeat against her sternum. In her fingers, her pulse is a reminder of time marching on, the seconds her crew _does not_ have to lose. Steady, she unknots her necklace. Her heart leaps in her chest, beating out a war tattoo.

 _Welcome home._ She has someone to leave behind, now, she thinks. Hanging from her fingers, the crystal catches in the light. _I’m not coming home._ Once more, Kes reaches out his hand, palm upwards.

She drops it into his grasp.

“Cassian Andor,” she says. Then, the words foreign on her tongue. “My husband.”

Kes nods, folding the necklace into his fatigue pants. “It’ll get to him.”

“Your son. Children deserve to grow up to have parents.” Jyn takes one last look around the escape pod, to Mirax and Vestra and Dreilide. “Make sure that this doesn’t go on his record. He doesn’t deserve to live with it. You hear me, Privates?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Yes’m.”

The soles of her boots sound against the grating as she forces herself back out of the escape pod and into the ship. An acrid taste that she knows is adrenaline fills her mouth, peace flooding her body. She must act swiftly now, and without hesitation.

“May the Force be with you,” she tells them, and hears her voice as through a fog.

She seals the hatch, locking the deadbolt. The klaxons grow louder as she climbs from the bottom deck up to the bridge, thick smoke from the electrical fire filling her lungs. The transmitter bites into her palm. Walking from aft to stern, she takes the path through the mess, grabbing the medkit from its place over the sink. The mess to the bridge, her vision begins to narrow, blackness creeping in from the edges. Running past the Captain’s body, she’s barely breathing as she enters the cockpit.

She flips a switch, and presses four buttons.

The escape pods launch.

She flips another switch, turning back on the radio. “This is Imperial shuttle XZ-614, prepare to be boarded. This is Imperial shuttle XZ-614, prepare to be boarded. This is—”

By the third repetition, she can no longer hear the robotic voice.

Spreading the medkit open on the dashboard, she locates the scalpel wrapped in sterilized packaging, tearing it open. _Neck?_ she considers. _Or arm?_ She doubts the officers stationed with this garrison will be looking for a bug under her skin, regardless, so she chooses her arm for the ease. _They can have your body, but not your mind,_ Saw rasps in her mind. She slices open the skin on the inside of her bicep, activates the transmitter, and slides it inside. Deciding to forgo a stitch, she closes the incision with a weave, wrapping it with gauze as she hears the airlock opening down below.

“Stand down!” a tinny voice filtered through a Stormtrooper helmet shouts. “Search the ship, they have to be somewhere.”

She knocks the medkit to the floor, scattering its contents.

Then she prepares herself to surrender.

 

* * *

 

Fury is a cold thing, burrowing deep into his bones, blackening his marrow into something hard and frozen solid. His feet are rooted to the durasteel floor, hands clenched at his side, knees locked.

Their transport back to the fleet hadn’t even been in the same sector as the flagship when he’d gotten the transmission on his datapad. _ALERT: Sgt Jyn Erso, listed MIA in enemy territory on Tarsa._ His legs, comprehending what had occurred before instinct gives way to conscious thought, set him off at a breathless run for the Command Center. _Again, again, again_ his heart beat in time, his blood sounding out the drums of war. This time he’s not getting the notification ten days too late, he’s not _too late._ And he won’t be questioned.

This is about _his—_

This is about Jyn.

The transmission line is open, but even with the schematics Dameron provided, it’s no use guessing where in the relay station she’s being held. Cassian stares at them anyway, his sight bleeding onto the blueprints, trying to clear his pounding pulse from his ears. The transmission line has been open for four days now, and it’s been eight hours since Jyn last made any noise. She chattered non stop, when they first launched the beacon and set up the private holonet server, walking the length of the unused office was held in and describing her makeshift prison in footsteps and hand lengths and the degree of the sun. Then they took her for questioning, not for the first time, they could tell.

The High Council hasn’t decided if they’re going to extract her yet.

Mounting an extraction will give up one set of their Imperial clearance codes, burn one of their Imperial shuttles. Cost them time, and likely men. And Cassian knows it’s tempting, to keep here there until they decide to shuffle _Lianna Hallick_ off the mortal coil or to prison.

Jyn is good at getting her interrogators to talk.

Draven keeps him within ten feet at all times, has two officers tail him during the brief small hours he leaves the Command Center to try to sleep. (He doesn’t. He did, the second night after she was captured, and the nightmares were worse than Scarif.) Cassian doubts that if Draven asked him outright if he would once again go rogue for Jyn Erso that he would even bother lying.

_Yes._

_She is my wife._

_I will always go after her. I will always come back to her._

Love is a nebulous thing, for men like him. It has done him no good in his life, to love someone, and he cannot conjure up a memory of love as a balm and not as a weapon. He and Jyn don’t speak of love, have never said the words. And if she dies, she’ll leave him with a ream of paperwork signed and notarized, sealing their union, the pink pearlescent burn tissue from Scarif that covers his arms and neck, and his twisted back, a limp disguised as a swaggering gait. And if she dies, he’ll follow her.

If she cannot come back, he will follow her, in time.

(Men like him, women like Jyn, they don’t love.

But he sent Bodhi to Hangar Deck C two hours ago to take a look at the Lambda class shuttles that the Alliance has in their possession at the moment.)

That is what Cassian understands about vows and promises and _marriage._ His mother and father died one after another, two blaster bolts in quick succession, their bodies dumped into the same mass grave, limbs splayed like two children reaching out.

“I — Captain Andor?”

“Yes,” he says sharply.

He looks up from the schematics to see the man who stole them.

“Gunnery Sergeant Kes Dameron, sir,” he reports, standing at attention. More for the other officers in the room than for him, Cassian thinks, based on where Dameron’s eyes are looking. “I wanted to say that I’m sorry, sir.”

“Don’t apologize to me.” He sounds more defensive than intended, emotion lilting off his tongue in a soft sibilant. His accent is stronger than he gives it permission to be. “You followed orders from a superior officer.”

“Yeah.” Dameron’s heels snap together, and he clasps his hands behind his back. “Dreilide’s still under sedation in Medbay, sir.”

Completely unwarranted, a smile tugs at the corner of Cassian’s mouth.

“I know it was Jyn who ordered you to abandon ship.”

It was the preliminary report from the debriefing that was under the pads of his fingers an hour ago, another five before that, eighteen hours ago. Even if he didn’t know her, he’d know that the explosion on the bridge that killed the Captain knocked out communications seven minutes before the escape pods were activated. Jyn calls the shots she takes.

“She wouldn’t…” Dameron’s voice trails off. When he speaks again, his words are harder, forceful. “I have a son. He’s not even a year old. She said children should grow up to have parents.”

“You can stop explaining yourself to me any time you’d like.”

It only serves as kindling to his anger.

“I was under the impression I was telling you how selfless your wife is,” Dameron retorts, cocking an eyebrow. Then, gaze askance at the figures at the lighted table in the center of the room, he shifts his body to keep his mouth in shadow. “General Syndulla is en route with Princess Leia. You’d only need to convince Mothma and Rieekan.”

Cassian says nothing, purposefully keeping his face blank.

“I know you sent your pilot down,” he urges.

“Are you going to report us?”

Because he has had his fill of well-meaning do-gooders who follow the rules when he’s been handed a different playbook his entire career. As if the rules don’t change based on the faction you fight with, the General who owns your commission.

There are no rules, only what you’re willing to do to win.

“I want in.”

“You have a son, Dameron,” he reminds him stiffly, as if being in proximity to domesticity makes him nervous, and it _doesn’t,_ “and Sergeant Erso can be quite insistent when she’s displeased.”

“I’ve seen her make quick work with her truncheons,” Dameron says almost jovially, and Cassian feels a pang at the reminder that there are others who spend weeks and months fighting at Jyn’s side when he hasn’t seen her for more than a few hours since her injuries on Lothal. “I didn’t even know she was married, you know?”

Cassian folds his lips into a grim line.

“Sounds like Jyn.”

Dameron reaches in the pockets of his fatigue pants, digging, and eventually bringing out a closed fist.  “Bet it sounds like you, too. She uh — she gave me this. To give to you.”

He holds the closure of his fingers between them, waiting for Cassian to provide him with a place to deposit what he’s holding. Gritting his teeth — _she better not have, that thrice-damned woman, this better not be_ — Cassian holds his hand open for Dameron.

The Kyber crystal lands in the lines of his palm.

_No._

Perturbed by the glower on Cassian’s face, Dameron keeps speaking. “She doesn’t think the Alliance is sending anyone to come in and clean up after her on this one. Don’t think she had the right estimation on you, though. But that’s just Jyn, I think. You spend a few months cooped up together on the same freighter, you get to talking, even with someone as locked up tight as her.”

Cassian swears vigorously in Festian, clenching his fingers around Jyn’s necklace, bringing it thoughtlessly to his heart — there isn’t a single holoimage of them together in the galaxy, but she is still his worst tell.

Scuffing the toe of his boot against the floor, Kes answers him.

He thought he’d heard a bit of the homeworld in Dameron’s voice.

“What happened?” he asks.

“Same thing that always happens — someone got sloppy, and people died.” He scrubs his hand over his face, hissing a breath between his teeth. He makes the decision on what he’s going to say as the words leave his mouth. Once is a polite offer. Twice is insistence, and commitment. “I know the planet, sir.”

“Don’t call me sir, Dameron.”

He’d prefer to do this without the formality of his rank dropped on him, should Syndulla and the Princess not be enough to sway the Council.

“You’ll need someone who was there, it’s not easy terrain and they’ll be expecting company,” Kes continues quietly, leaning in closer. He chews on his words again, letting them fight the backs of his teeth before he speaks them. “Listen, if my wife was shot down in the scrum, I hope someone would go after her. I don’t know how the Force works, but I’m going to put this one into the universe and hope it all works out in the end. Just helps that I like Jyn, okay? She’s a good person to have with you in the trenches. We can’t lose people like her.”

Somewhere in between yelling himself hoarse and getting her off Tarsa and getting her into a medical bay, Cassian plans to tie Lyra Erso’s kyber crystal back around Jyn’s neck.

_How dare she._

He blinks once, twice, and swallows hard.

“No, we can’t.”

The receiver crackles back to life — for all that he wishes he could appreciate that Jyn has the attention of High Command in her capture, he knows that they are just waiting for her to divulge rebel secrets so that they can know when to run, what to burn — and the Command Center comes to as close as silence as it is possible to get. Systems away, Jyn gives them a watery cough, a muffled sniffle. A soft whine.

Then, with an unsteady voice, thin and reedy:

 _...between the here, between the now… between the north, between the south…_ The receiver crackles again, then there’s a pounding, like a fist on the floor. _Between the east, between the west… between the time, between the place…_

With a shaky inhale, Cassian closes his eyes, breathes out.

_From the shell, a song of the sea, neither quiet nor calm, mo ghrá…_

Five hours on a cot in empty barracks on a far-flung planet, in a temporary rebel base built from a tent city. Jyn curled at his side, carding her fingers through his hair, singing in an untrained voice. Her mother would sing, it’s the only way she can remember her mother’s voice. By the Force, it was cold in that tent, snow piling up outside and their oil heater not throwing off nearly enough heat, but she’d been due to ship out to the Core and he was receiving an intel packet from the flagship, had needed a secure Alliance holonet server.

They’d had just enough time.

“Is she singing?” Kes asks.

Jyn’s voice trembles.

There was snow on her eyelashes, when she stepped onto her transport. He’d waved her off, said nothing. There was silence on her lips, too.

Cassian hears what she doesn’t say.

“She’s in pain.”

 

* * *

 

When the stims they gave her wore off she was left in a stupor, laying on the floor of her cell with her arm left folded under her. Jyn doesn’t have to look to know that the burning pain cooled into a worrying numbness because her arm is no longer in it’s socket. And were she more enterprising, she would set it herself, like Saw taught her all those years ago.

_On your feet, soldier._

But the numbness might spare her some more pain, later.

The officers on Tarsa aren’t the full mettle of the Imperial forces, and the relay station doesn’t even have proper holding cells. The administrator who received her at the loading dock hadn’t even asked her name, at first, and certainly hasn’t run her face through the criminal database — while Lianna Hallick is an escaped convict and suspected rebel, Jyn Erso has a bounty of a hundred thousand credits on her head, dead or alive, by order of Darth Vader.

The interrogation is par for the course, from what she remembers. If they kill her, it’ll likely be a clumsy accident of brute force.

But sooner or later, they’ll send her to a prison.

And they will run her face against the database.

Then the torture won’t be conducted by amateurs, the interrogators will be practiced and trained and ruthless. (In her mind, she sees the Bor Gullet and Saw, but the Empire has always been far more refined than the Partisans. She’s heard the whispers about what Vader did during the Princess’ time on the Death Star.) And then… _then_ they’ll kill her.

Squeezing her eyes shut against the harsh overhead light, she prays to the Maker that the last thing Cassian hears from her isn't treason against the cause.

“Between the stones, between the storm… between belief, between the sea… tá mé i dtiúin…”  


**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments and kudos are always very much appreciated. The song Jyn sings is the lullaby or "Saoirse Song" from _Song of the Sea_. 
> 
> If you're interested, I'm on tumblr @ofhouseadama.


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